On Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 9:33 PM Daniel Essin via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Here's a DOS story from 1983. I had just gotten my new IBM XT It had > it had 1 floppy and an hdd. I had a DOS program that was hard-coded > to access the B: drive but, of course the XT didn't have a B: > drive. I has the original Norton Utilities. I used it to open the > program file and fond B: embedded in the executable. I changed the B > to an A and saved. Problem solved. > > I wrote to Peter Norton and told him how I used his program. He wrote > back saying: "wow, I didn't know you could do that" > > Maybe that sort of thing might still be useful today?
Hex editors are incredibly useful things; we include at least two hex editors in FreeDOS: doshexed and uhex. Making small edits to binary files is a great way to work around limitations like you found. One way that I used a hex editor was to modify the INI file for the Galaxy word processor -- this was a shareware word processor that I used all the time as an undergraduate in the 1990s. Today, the company doesn't exist, so I can't contact anyone to register it. But you can edit byte 1E to 00, which resets the "number of times you've run this program for evaluation" back to 1 (the value is 01 if you've run it twice, and so on). **Of course, in my situation, I eventually just made a copy of the INI after running it for the first time, and copied that backup file over GALAXY.INI whenever I wanted to reset the count. :-) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
